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Public Health Practices

Enhancing Emergency Preparedness and Response

Public Health Practices Project has ended

The Public Health Practices (PHP) program at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) concluded a 12-month study in 2014 to assess (1) the needs of public health preparedness professionals, (2) how the forces of health reform affect them, (3) what role our project might play going forward, and (4) options for sustainable funding. We learned the following:

PHP is considered the premier source of salient, vetted, and rapidly delivered tools applicable to the real world in which public health practitioners and partners work. In just this past year, subscribers to this newsletter have more than doubled, and downloads of tools and practices submitted by hundreds of preparedness professionals on the site continue to rise.

Practitioners depend on PHP and use it in creative ways that exceed expectations when the project was launched in 2007, including training new staff, reaching out to new partners, adding content to health agency Web sites, finding documentation for reports, and even for help making decisions.

Public health practitioners are a resilient group of professionals who find opportunity and see possibility even when funding is dwindling and expectations and workloads are rising steeply. Partnerships and networks are keys to that resilience.

The field of public health preparedness has matured over the past decade, and practitioners want more evidence to plan and prioritize how best to deploy limited resources; however, very little evidence exists.

No sustainable funding exists to keep the PHP project afloat. CIDRAP explored foundation, association, academic and federal funding possibilities during the study. Although the project operates with less than 2.0 FTE, ongoing funding to cover even these minimal costs is simply not available.

As such, CIDRAP has made the difficult decision to end the project as of Dec 31, 2014.

Outreach efforts, including the PHP social media accounts (Facebook and Twitter) and the bimonthly newsletter will no longer be available after 2014. The PHP Web site will remain open, and we hope you’ll to continue to use the many tools available there, with the understanding that no new content will be added or updated. We also encourage you to take advantage of content available on the following sites:

We thank you for reading Public Health Practices Update and for making your exemplary practices, tools, and resources available to other practitioners and partners. It has been an honor to provide this service for you.

The collaboration between ASTHO and CIDRAP broadly expanded the scope of the Promising Practices Web site, a vetted collection of pandemic preparedness practices. Launched in June 2011 as Public Health Practices, the site was reorganized around categories of hazards, redesigned, and made more interactive. The project expanded outreach efforts to include a monthly (now bimonthly) new theme-based email newsletter and it significantly boosted efforts began to connect public health practitioners to each other and valuable practice tools through social media channels

Public Health Practices was then supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation until May 2014. The support allowed PHP to determine its role and funding sources by (1) ensuring that public health preparedness resources continued to be available to practitioners and (2) allowed for an assessment of the best future home, structure, and potential financial support for this project.